I Like Llanes!

Sunday 26th May

It was a lazy Sunday morning start, for us anyway, Lesley took Andy on a bike ride to earn his breakfast in town of toast and gazpacho. He cycled enough to be able to bring me back a Florentine too! Meanwhile I did a spot of blogging. There was no rush as we didn’t have to leave the site until two o’clock and, as a result of last night’s map chat, we only had a short drive along the coast to the next town of Llanes.

Llanes appeared to present a number of psychological barriers to the humble motorhomer. It only has one campsite and we arrived to find that is was shut. It only opens at weekends (Friday and Saturday nights) and it doesn’t take dogs anyway. We wove our way through the back streets avoiding threatening signs of campervans with a red line through them to a carpark which gave access to Llanes campervan aire. We were surprised to see only three vans in the aire, and a dozen parked in the car park. It soon became clear that the reason was, the automatic barrier controlling access to the aire was broken and we couldn’t get in, so we made fourteen in the car park.

We had lunch in a tiny cove about a mile’s walk along the cliffs from the carpark. It was an amazing place, almost totally enclosed by cliffs and no direct line of sight to the sea, the waves came from around a corner and lapped on the beach. Apart from us there were only ten other people on the beach, on a sunny Sunday afternoon – cue, the Small Faces!

We took a couple of diversions on the way back to avoid some belligerent cows with calves and left the dogs to recover in the vans as we walked into town looking for a place to eat.

Llanes has a very pretty mediaeval centre, clustered around the still working fishing harbour. Our path took us past an old castle keep, church, burnt out manor house and remains of the town walls to the breakwater. The breakwater was quirky to say the least the two metre cubes reinforcing it on both sides had been painted by an artist and the result is called ‘Los Cubos de la Memoria’. A great way to brighten up an otherwise fairly mundane part of town.

Mundane is not a word you can use about the inner harbour, I said simply; “Wow!” Pretty buildings of all colours, shapes and sizes crowd in tightly on the quaysides. There were plenty of bars and restaurants as well as tourist tat shops.

Up a narrow side street we spied a little place that was serving Menu del Dia for €12.50. It wasn’t open yet so we continued toured the rest of the town, had a glass of wine in the town square and returned just after eight. There was only one other person dining, but we knew we had found the right place, Casa Canenejust reeked of authenticity. By the time we were on our main course the place was almost full. Three courses, two bottles of wine and a bottle of water all for €50! The staff were very attentive too, making it by far our best restaurant of the trip (so far?).